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Joseph Conrad's JOSEPH CONRAD’S “WILD STORY OF A JOURNALIST” BY MATTHEW RUBERY In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) We shudder at the brutality of the way a butcher uses the knife: ah, but this is nothing at all compared to the most dreadful recklessness and callousness with which a journalist, addressing himself to the whole country, if possible, uses untruth. —Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (1849) Henry Stanley traveled to Africa in January 1871 with the follow- ing assignment from the New York Herald: “Find out Livingstone, and get what news you can relating to his discoveries.”1 Month after month readers watched the newspapers for reports of the silent explorer. News of Dr. David Livingstone’s discoveries—and his own discovery, in this case—reached London in May 1872 to the delight of international audiences.2 One impressed reader was Joseph Conrad, who recalled hearing the accomplishments of explorers “whispered to me in my cradle” and reading as a boy Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), a source of the sentimental daydreams that would one day make him a steamboat captain on the Congo.3 The newspaper itself read like an exploration narrative at such moments, never more so than in the journalism of Stanley, who introduced the press to territory formerly reserved for the explorer’s lone voice. Stanley’s dispatches gave audiences the impressions of a correspondent, the adventures of an explorer, and the plots of a novelist, all in a single column. Yet these dispatches also gave audiences a misleading perspective on events, as Conrad learned when his own African experiences failed to correspond with MatthewELH 71 (2004) Rubery 751–774 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 751 press descriptions. He returned to England in 1891, disenchanted and resentful of events excluded from the London newspapers. Conrad did not forget Stanley’s publicity lesson. In 1898, while writing a fictional work drawing from his experiences in Africa, he would make the novel’s most compromised character a journalist. Stanley and Livingstone’s story, which first appeared in the news- papers, is a reminder of how influential print journalism was for late- Victorian authors. The newspaper made available to the novel, to adapt a phrase from Mikhail Bakhtin, “new worlds of verbal percep- tion.”4 Conrad’s perception of the world was influenced as much by the daily press as by serious literature. He read with the skeptical perspective of a cosmopolitan émigré forced to rely on the newspaper’s foreign correspondence for news of Poland, France, Africa, and, while at sea, of home. Foreign news at the time was a pastiche of accounts from British political figures, Reuters wire service, and the paper’s own journalists. The foreign correspondence provided him with the latest intelligence in a commercial format often lacking perspective or thick cultural description. In Conrad’s view, corre- spondents were responsible for public misperception of events experienced only through the pages of the daily newspaper. Letters and essays reveal his recurrent frustrations with international report- age as inadequate mediations of complex psychological and political situations. As Marlow says in Chance (1913), “Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand anything? I guess not.”5 Conrad was reacting to recent developments in journalism which saw the foreign correspondent established as a legitimate profession by the end of the nineteenth century.6 Michael Schudson has argued that the professional reporter was an invention of the 1880s and 1890s, decades in which editors began employing experienced writ- ers rather than informal sources (including their friends) as the paper’s “own correspondent.”7 According to Lucy Brown, foreign correspondence became increasingly prominent after the Franco- Prussian War, when public interest shifted from war reporting to foreign reporting on diplomatic relations.8 The generic term “corre- spondent” by Conrad’s time had come to include recognizable names like Nellie Bly, William Howard Russell, and, of course, Henry Stanley. More than any previous journalist, Stanley made exploration of Africa a public spectacle through a sensational style that aimed to interest and excite audiences. Stanley spoke with the authority of the press, and his voice was an enduring problem for Conrad, who henceforth would criticize newspapers for shaping perception of 752 Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist” events—a phenomenon addressed in the eloquent journalism of Kurtz. Conrad is often remembered alongside journalist-writers such as Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, Richard Harding Davis, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle in their criticism of the Belgian Congo, but studies are just beginning to address the ele- ments of journalism in his own writing.9 Conrad’s novels show his interest to lie not with the reformers but with the unprecedented influence of sensational journalists. He is one of the earliest authors to challenge the press for its psychological authority—indeed, its emergence as a mass media—rather than its subliterary status as panem et circenses for the public. Heart of Darkness (1898) more than any other novel shows the influence of the newspapers on Conrad’s fiction. News supplied factual sources and, more impor- tantly, intellectual provocation for this novel. Discussions of Africa in the English and Belgian press made Conrad aware of journalism as a discourse influencing the way individuals see, talk about, and under- stand world events. Hence Conrad’s novel is as concerned with the media through which Kurtz represents experience as with the experience itself, for it is the newspapers that bring Kurtz’s voice out of Africa. I. CONRAD AND THE PRESS English newspapers gave Conrad his first language lessons. Letters describe him arriving in Lowestoft in May 1878 and reading the Standard.10 Reading the news not only introduced him to English speech and customs but also cultivated a sense of belonging to an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson defines the nation.11 W. G. Sebald records the following news items appearing the week of Conrad’s arrival: a mine explosion in Wigan; a Mohammedan uprising in Rumelia; Kaffir unrest in South Africa; the hazards of Bosnia; the status of Hong Kong; the departure of the Largo Bay steamship; the Duke of Cambridge’s voyage to Malta; a Whitby housemaid’s death; and a Silsden mother’s stroke.12 Sebald’s miscellany makes sense only in the pages of the daily newspaper, where links among items are imagined, though reassuringly grounded, in everyday life. Conrad was participating in a national ritual along with other citizens reading the same reported events on the same day. Just as he experienced home through the newspaper’s foreign intelligence, so he gradually became English through reading about world news. Matthew Rubery 753 Conrad’s newspaper reading is a reminder of the distance that he felt between himself and most destinations. He traveled among ports as an outsider soon to cast off, always glimpsing local life from afar. One letter attributes this distance to the call of duty: “But indeed I knew very little of and about shore people. I was chief mate of the S. S. Vidar and very busy whenever in harbour.” The very phrase “shore people” suggests the quasi-anthropological perspective of an outside- observer. Edward Garnett recalls Conrad’s frustration at this detach- ment: “I have spent half my life knocking about in ships, only getting ashore between voyages. I know nothing, nothing! except from the outside. I have to guess at everything!” V. S. Naipaul, another writer used to cultural displacement, argues that Conrad’s protest over a lack of material “is the complaint of a writer who is missing a society. Conrad’s experience was too scattered; he knew many societies by their externals, but he knew none in depth.”13 From such a vantage point, the news offered compensatory insight into societies grasped only intermittently through experience. Newspapers offered the outsider a degree of cultural literacy difficult to acquire through the limited contact during stays in port. Two of Conrad’s political essays, however, ask whether audiences were in fact becoming accustomed to reading about distant atrocities through the newspapers. The impersonal voice of the newspaper was a particular problem for Conrad, who in “Poland Revisited” (1915) claims to have been so dissatisfied with the daily press that he was unaware of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. He disapproved of the “necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless man- ner of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest.” This impersonal, disembodied voice made events feel remote from one’s life, a drawback too well understood by the son of patriot Apollo Korzienowski. “Autocracy and War” (1905) shows Conrad’s concern for a mass audience unable to make the same fine discriminations as he, going so far as to distrust the very form of the newspaper in a series of peculiarly phenomenological criticisms. Opinions found in the press could not be tolerated except for “something subtly noxious to the human brain in the composition of newspaper ink” or “the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, [that] exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity.” Newspapers encourage misinformed and complacent readers according to this view, for the “printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; 754 Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist” leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.”14 The oxymoronic phrase “still uproar” ex- presses the deep frustration he felt as both Polish exile and British citizen in watching world events reduced to idle conversation.
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